Summary: Neural Mechanisms of Affective Interference in Schizotypy
Aprajita Mohanty, John D. Herrington,
Nancy S. Koven, Joscelyn E. Fisher,
Elizabeth A. Wenzel, Andrew G. Webb, and
Wendy Heller
University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign
Marie T. Banich
University of Colorado at Boulder
Gregory A. Miller
University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign
Negatively valenced stimuli foster cognitive impairment in schizotypy and schizophrenia. To identify
relevant brain mechanisms, the authors had 16 positive-schizotypy and 16 control participants perform
an emotional Stroop task, judging the ink color of negative and neutral words during functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) of regional brain activity. Schizotypy individuals showed increased right and
decreased left activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating a deficit in maintenance of attentional
set in the presence of negative emotional distractors. They also showed abnormal activity in ventral
limbic areas, including decreased activity in nucleus accumbens and increased activity in hippocampus
and amygdala, a circuit involved in the integration of cognitive and affective processes. These results
indicate that aspects of emotion­cognition processes and the brain mechanisms that implement them are
similar in schizotypy and schizophrenia.